7:40 a.m.R thinks that fat guy four houses down is gay because he has an Equality sticker (=) on the bumper of his car. But R thought MKM was a lesbian for the same reason. I think this guy down the way is just a liberal, like MKM. But unlike MKM, he's a drunkard. I see him walking up and down the alley, "walking" his dogs, always with a cocktail in his hand, no matter what time of day it is. I saw him around Christmas at about 6:30 or 7 in the morning with a very thin eggnog.
This morning, it's warmer out than it has been. The weather reports have been saying it's going to get warmer for days, but the weather hasn't borne out the reports.
I went down in the basement to feed Raz this morning as I do every morning, and the dehumidifier was humming away, drawing up moisture from its frozen ribs and then dripping it right back out onto the basement floor. I took the bucket from it yesterday to wash the kitchen floor and forgot to replace it, and forgot to put it back when I was done. The bucket was outside the basement door leading into the back yard. I opened the door to get the bucket, and that's when I noticed the weather, the nicer weather.
I replaced the bucket, fed the cat, then came back upstairs and admired my cleaning job (oops, a small puddle of water still remains!), and I opened the back door and stuck my head out to feel the day that's coming.
At first, I thought I was hearing a radio announcer, but then realized it was live voices, a man, mostly, and a woman, bellowing out over the neighborhood. It was the voice of the fat guy and perhaps the woman I've seen him with once before. I assumed when I saw them together before that they were a couple--I could be as wrong as R. They were in the middle of an argument. Their voices were raised and both of them sounded like victims.
"Well, I did this and then you did!"
"No I did not! It was you!"
I'm not even sure what the they were saying. When couples fight there is so much coded language, an outsider would have to be trained to understand the morsels of anger flying back and forth. I couldn't help myself. I stood their {sic} listening even though I didn't really understand.
The fat drunk guy has been building a fortress in his back yard for as long as I've lived in this neighborhood. There are eight-foot walls on three sides, nestling his house in arms of adobe. And since last summer he's been building some sort of a two-story structure in the middle of his back yard. It's not a garage, there's no entrance for cars that I can make out. Right now, the structure is just a sore thumb, a big pink structure with the logo of the pink outer insulation repeated on the outside wall. Around Thanksgiving, he added holiday wreaths and garland to the side of the structure to try to camouflage its incomplete state. One of the door-sized windows on the second floor was open. I didn't realize this until it was closed, shut quickly.
Maybe he saw me standing halfway out of the back door of my house, four yards away, listening to their argument. Or maybe it was her, embarrassed that this drunkenness always gets to this place. The structure is well insulated. As soon as the French door window was closed, the argument was barely more than a muffled hum, like many other noises in the neighborhood, not decipherable as an argument and not decipherable as coming from there.
I pulled my head back into my house, back into my own business, sort of. I picked up my journal and started writing.
Just a few minutes ago, R woke up, and he and Jesse came downstairs. He let Jesse outside and he went to his computer to check the weather, to see whether or not it would be a good day to hang laundry out on the line. Shortly, Jesse was running up and down the length of the fence, whining/barking. I looked out to see the fat drunk guy's four dogs running down the alleyway, and then the fat drunk guy himself, carrying a convenience store size cup - a Big Gulp or something like that, and something makes me think it wasn't full of Mountain Dew. Not from a fountain, anyway!
This morning, it's warmer out than it has been. The weather reports have been saying it's going to get warmer for days, but the weather hasn't borne out the reports.
I went down in the basement to feed Raz this morning as I do every morning, and the dehumidifier was humming away, drawing up moisture from its frozen ribs and then dripping it right back out onto the basement floor. I took the bucket from it yesterday to wash the kitchen floor and forgot to replace it, and forgot to put it back when I was done. The bucket was outside the basement door leading into the back yard. I opened the door to get the bucket, and that's when I noticed the weather, the nicer weather.
I replaced the bucket, fed the cat, then came back upstairs and admired my cleaning job (oops, a small puddle of water still remains!), and I opened the back door and stuck my head out to feel the day that's coming.
At first, I thought I was hearing a radio announcer, but then realized it was live voices, a man, mostly, and a woman, bellowing out over the neighborhood. It was the voice of the fat guy and perhaps the woman I've seen him with once before. I assumed when I saw them together before that they were a couple--I could be as wrong as R. They were in the middle of an argument. Their voices were raised and both of them sounded like victims.
"Well, I did this and then you did!"
"No I did not! It was you!"
I'm not even sure what the they were saying. When couples fight there is so much coded language, an outsider would have to be trained to understand the morsels of anger flying back and forth. I couldn't help myself. I stood their {sic} listening even though I didn't really understand.
The fat drunk guy has been building a fortress in his back yard for as long as I've lived in this neighborhood. There are eight-foot walls on three sides, nestling his house in arms of adobe. And since last summer he's been building some sort of a two-story structure in the middle of his back yard. It's not a garage, there's no entrance for cars that I can make out. Right now, the structure is just a sore thumb, a big pink structure with the logo of the pink outer insulation repeated on the outside wall. Around Thanksgiving, he added holiday wreaths and garland to the side of the structure to try to camouflage its incomplete state. One of the door-sized windows on the second floor was open. I didn't realize this until it was closed, shut quickly.
Maybe he saw me standing halfway out of the back door of my house, four yards away, listening to their argument. Or maybe it was her, embarrassed that this drunkenness always gets to this place. The structure is well insulated. As soon as the French door window was closed, the argument was barely more than a muffled hum, like many other noises in the neighborhood, not decipherable as an argument and not decipherable as coming from there.
I pulled my head back into my house, back into my own business, sort of. I picked up my journal and started writing.
Just a few minutes ago, R woke up, and he and Jesse came downstairs. He let Jesse outside and he went to his computer to check the weather, to see whether or not it would be a good day to hang laundry out on the line. Shortly, Jesse was running up and down the length of the fence, whining/barking. I looked out to see the fat drunk guy's four dogs running down the alleyway, and then the fat drunk guy himself, carrying a convenience store size cup - a Big Gulp or something like that, and something makes me think it wasn't full of Mountain Dew. Not from a fountain, anyway!
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